A post on the EA website by Lucy Bradshaw has the latest word from the Maxis label general manager to discuss the fairly disastrous launch for SimCity, their online-only urban planning game. She explains what's going on with the game, and promises those who have suffered through its launch will be rewarded with a free game. "And to get us back in your good graces, we’re going to offer you a free PC download game from the EA portfolio. On March 18, SimCity players who have activated their game will receive an email telling them how to redeem their free game," she writes. "I know that’s a little contrived – kind of like buying a present for a friend after you did something crummy. But we feel bad about what happened. We’re hoping you won’t stay mad and that we’ll be friends again when SimCity is running at 100 percent." Here's word on the current status of the game:

The server issues which began at launch have improved significantly as we added more capacity. But some people are still experiencing response and stability problems that we’re working fast to address.

So what went wrong? The short answer is: a lot more people logged on than we expected. More people played and played in ways we never saw in the beta.

OK, we agree, that was dumb, but we are committed to fixing it. In the last 48 hours we increased server capacity by 120 percent. It’s working – the number of people who have gotten in and built cities has improved dramatically. The number of disrupted experiences has dropped by roughly 80 percent.

So we’re close to fixed, but not quite there. I’m hoping to post another update this weekend to let everyone know that the launch issues are behind us.

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Dmitri_M wrote on Mar 10, 2013, 13:22:I really despise people lumping artists and game programmers under the general banner of "entertainment industry employee". We are not as exchangable as the people who work on movie sets like key grips or boom techs.. We have technical/artistic skills that go beyond the average film set worker.

It's ok, it was pretty apparent that he had no idea what he was talking about so I wouldn't be offended.